2084

By David Perlstein

After its second revolution, America is nothing—and everything—to joke about. The U.S.A. is history. In 2044, the Covenantal States of America constitutes a white-Christian autocracy echoing George Orwell’s banned classic, 1984. Washington pushes back against armed rebels, humor ridiculing tyranny and mushrooming graffiti referencing Orwell’s novel in the form of 2084.
Sam Klein, a member of the Minyan, a clandestine group of stand-up comics, organizes a July Fourth comedy protest while his Indian-American wife Indira, a native Californian, faces deportation. The Fourth, celebrating an America made great yet again, brings unexpected fireworks.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: May 20, 2021
• ISBN: 9781663222749

David Perlstein

DAVID PERLSTEIN has authored eight other novels and a volume of short stories. He also wrote God’s Others: Non-Israelites’ Encounters with God in the Hebrew Bible and Solo Success: 100 Tips for becoming a $100,000-a-Year Freelancer. David lives in San Francisco. davidperlstein.com

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Copyright © 2021 David Perlstein.

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ISBN: 978-1-6632-2275-6 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-6632-2274-9 (e)

iUniverse rev. date:  05/19/2021

Contents

Summer

Chapter 1 You guys hear about the President?

Chapter 2 I’m so boring

Chapter 3 So, a duck, a pig and a rabbi

Chapter 4 The other day, I beat all my kids wrestling

Chapter 5 How many people does it take to make an omelet?

Chapter 6 Know why you call a judge Your Honor?

Chapter 7 You want a happy wife?

Chapter 8 You whip up Chicken Vindalouisville

Chapter 9 Do you know the word chutzpah?

Chapter 10 What’s with the titles of doctoral dissertations?

Chapter 11 The British writer Samuel Johnson put patriotism in perspective

Chapter 12 A deer—could be an antelope, maybe an ibex

Chapter 13 Don’t fuck with a piece of ass because she’s lower on the corporate ladder

Chapter 14 The last time I got this kind of reception

Chapter 15 In this shtetl in the old country

Chapter 16 How many gods does it take

Chapter 17 Then he shot me a line almost as thrilling as a rectal exam

Chapter 18 Man plans, God laughs

Chapter 19 Like Big Brother turned into Little Sister

Winter

Chapter 20 A duck, a pig and a rabbi—redux

Chapter 21 The joke was on me

Author’s Note

For our children and their children

There are no conditions to which a man cannot

become used, especially if he sees that all

around him are living in the same way.

Leo Tolstoy

Anna Karenina

•

Every joke is a tiny revolution.

George Orwell

Funny, but not Vulgar

Summer

1

You guys hear about the President?

THE FOOTSTEPS—THICK-SOLE, STEEL-TOE HEAVY, no pretense at stealth—approached our floor from the wrong direction. On a Monday morning, most people left their apartments for work, shlepped their still-sleepy way down the stairs as Indira had earlier. The stomping that terrified me came up from the lobby. I guessed two men. Possibly three. Probably three. They fetishized displays of muscle.

Winston, our light bronze pug, whimpered.

I raised a finger to my lips.

Winston cocked his head.

The kitchen radio was still on.

I turned it off.

He nodded his approval.

Winston and I held our collective breath. They might pass on rousting us if we stayed silent, didn’t answer the knock. We had a bell, but they always knocked. They’d figure Indira and I were out, go on to another assignment. They always had lots of assignments. I’d alert Indira when I got home. Couldn’t trust a phone call. We’d try to make sense of the situation before they came back. They always came back.

The footsteps exploded on our landing.

Winston took a defensive position, thought better of it and nestled between my feet.

I put my hand over my mouth. I had no idea what good that would do.

The footsteps ascended to the next floor, began to fade.

To muffle any noise from upstairs and also make a statement—I’m a loyal American—in case they came back—you never knew—I turned the radio back on.

Projecting a voice of authority that mocked my father’s sputters and coughs before he went silent, the morning anchor on KCSA, Northern California’s largest official news station, sounded the alert. The White House was about to make an announcement concerning November’s 2044 presidential election.

Still in my boxers at our confining kitchen table, I downed the last of the red, white and blue wheat flakes saluting the July Fourth holiday four weeks out. I’d topped it with banana, one of the few food imports allowed into the country. On Indira’s off days, she whipped up Indian treats like Dal Ka Paratha and Sali Par Edu. She’d also taught herself to make matzo balls way better than my mother’s, granting that my mother rarely cooked. Now, matzo meal and matzos were hard to find.

I waited for the announcement.

Winston settled on my feet.

I nudged him off.

He growled.

I shrugged, pushed my chair back and took two steps to the small, stained sink to wash my bowl, knife and spoon. An ad guy would describe our kitchen not as old but antique. Our building went up before the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor a century earlier. Grandpa Danny heard from his folks that the West Coast feared being invaded by Japan. So we beat the shit out of them then help them get rich. He died before Japan became a protectorate of China.

I’d hesitated when Indira and I looked at the apartment before we got married a few years back.

She read me the riot act. You know how hard it is to find anything decent in San Francisco unless you know someone? Besides, it’s not like we’ll be here forever.

To me, forever looked like a safe bet. But we had a view of Golden Gate Park—if you pressed your right cheek against the living room window and stared across Fulton Street. Also, we could walk a mile west and stroll Ocean Beach when the Pacific didn’t beat against the newly reinforced and already cracking seawall.

I dried my bowl and pried open the cupboard door above the cracked tile counter. A spider held its ground on a web not yet completed. Indira and I never claimed to be fastidious housekeepers, but we tried. We probably still feared disapproval by our mothers—both gone, if in different ways.

The morning anchor drew my attention to a White House spokesman, who introduced the President. After clearing his throat for as long as it would take an Olympian to run the 100-meter dash, the President cut to the chase. Submitting to the will of the people, he would seek a fourth term. His last. To stay vigorous, democracy required new blood as it once required shedding blood. In January ’49, he would hand the reins to a younger man groomed to shoulder the office’s grave responsibilities.

No question, the President would rack up another spectacular victory. Opposing candidates from splinter parties ran—or limped—with Washington’s blessing to showcase the enduring nature of American democracy in its second iteration. The President would carry all fifty states. Years earlier, Texas perched on the verge of secession, but the Righteous Revolution ended all talk about again becoming the Lone Star Republic. The President concluded with his standard God bless the Covenantal States of America.

Something wet and rough scraped my right calf.

I glanced down.

Winston looked up. His eyes communicated urgency.

Hang on, I said.

Winston’s creased black face relaxed—in a pug’s way. His default expression intimated that he carried the weight of the world on his back. His muscled shoulders suggested that, like Atlas, he could manage it. But Winston was happy-go-lucky and affectionate—unless you rubbed him the wrong way. People we knew commented on how he made them laugh. As a struggling stand-up comic who maintained a day job, I envied Winston’s wry sense of humor and perfect timing. Had he been human, he might have gone far.

Except that stand-up comics with attitude went places we’d all rather avoid.

When asked, Indira and I said we named him after Winston Churchill, the British prime minister who resisted Nazi Germany. We didn’t, but truth involved major risk.

Winston emitted what might be taken for a snarl. He’d consumed his kibble and emptied his water bowl before Indira left. Of course, I’d read her note: Sam, Running late. Take Winston to the park so he can do his business. And go by the hardware store during lunch. That end table won’t paint itself.

Just be a minute, I informed the ersatz businessman.

Winston followed me into the bedroom.

I closed the door. At this point, and in spite of the usual morning warm-up, I would have turned the air-conditioner off. It was the apartment’s one and only, placed in the bedroom so we could sleep. We ran it sparingly. Electricity didn’t come cheap, what with utilities constantly raising rates to cover the costs of fires around the state. Leaving it on a few more minutes served two purposes. It kept me cool and, given the noise it made, might free Winston and me from hearing any unpleasantness on the floor above.

As I dressed, I ran over a new joke for my stand-up open mic the next night. I lusted after those occasional opportunities to polish my act before a live and hopefully not-totally-blotto audience. Comedy venues had grown scarce. I figured this was a good time to try a would-be gem on Winston. So this cop runs into this hooker—

Winston glowered then pawed the bedroom door.

I conceded that the joke might not have been up to the material of second-tier stand-ups a hundred years earlier, lifers who opened for stars in the Catskill Mountains and Miami Beach. Or what used to be Miami Beach before it turned into Atlantis. In the hall, harness and leash in hand, another joke came to me. I was convinced I had something. "Or I could open with, You guys hear about the President? He’s running for a fourth term. But this is a comedy club, and there’s nothing funny about that."

Winston’s eyes blazed with disbelief.

Okay, it’s dangerous, I said. But this country needs political humor more than ever. I slipped two small plastic bags into my pocket. At the front door, I placed my hand on the knob, pressed an ear against the door. All quiet. Pushing on with stand-up, I said, you think I could be getting in over my head?

THE MEN’S BUS LURCHED DOWNTOWN. Slack-jawed riders jammed shoulder to shoulder suffered an endless series of pinball collisions. Searching for a measure of tranquility, many wore headphones. All eyes displayed the standard blank, middle-distance stare.

I found consolation in knowing that the women’s and family buses were just as packed—maybe more so since they ran less frequently. Schedules allowed the unhurried completion of each route. This enabled the frequently boasted claim that the buses ran on time.

I glanced out a sliver of window. Workmen in yellow vests filled potholes other workers had filled only a month or two before. Shoddy work was the norm. Members of bloated street crews figured, The pay’s shit but the government forces everyone to have a job, so let the other schmucks break their balls.

The air-conditioning system belched. Vents streamed warm air. Passengers opened windows—which streamed warm air.

The bus sped up. Seconds later, the driver slammed on the brakes. Passengers let loose the customary barrage of complaints for which the bus mercifully offered cover. The same expletives uttered in an outdoor space earned a citation for a first offense. A second produced a week in a cell almost as crowded as the bus and less pleasant. Bitch, let alone cunt, rewarded even a first-timer a month in the country under worse conditions if even a single white woman stood or sat within earshot.

The bus chugged on. A yawning pothole not yet addressed rattled my teeth. The bus screeched to another sudden stop. Passengers experienced levels of intimacy prohibited in movies and on TV by the Decency Act of ’37. I turned my head away from a guy who generously could be called big-boned and seemed to be sharing my suit coat. He smelled of aftershave suggesting household cleaner overlaid by pork buns. I assumed he wasn’t too thrilled with my scent, less exotic but by now pungent in its own distinctive way.

A black van crept past. It displayed the five-pointed-star-and-cross logo of the Patriots for Jesus and America, No doubt it carried a crew of well-armed Jesus Freaks.

I shivered.

I almost wished I’d taken my chances on my skateboard, but Indira frowned on a thirty-two-year-old weaving through the heart of the city on a kid’s ride. I granted that while special lanes provided space for people on wheels not attached to motors and the occasional runner hellbent on suicide by asphyxiation, the police looked at hassling anyone on a board as a perk.

Added to that, even if I skated with my coat in my hand or tied around my waist, my employer-mandated white shirt would generate cantaloupe-size armpit stains. The ones produced by the bus were more the size of grapefruit. Unavoidable on another sweltering June morning.

Wizened locals once fetishized Mark Twain’s supposed comment that the coldest winter he ever spent was a summer in San Francisco. Now they lamented we’d become Los Angeles, might soon compete for the title Helltown, C.S.A. with Phoenix and Las Vegas where May-through-October highs reached the mid-one-twenties.

Our famous fog? Fuhgeddaboudit.

A few days a month, Karl hit and ran like a purse-snatcher. When I was a kid, some unknown local named the fog Karl. It became a thing. You knew who Karl was, you were a real San Franciscan. Now, Karl mostly seemed chained to the horizon, held fast by Hawaii’s gravitational pull. Undaunted, the city fathers—a call for city mothers no longer existed—mandated that shops along Fisherman’s Wharf, in Chinatown and around Union Square sell postcards displaying our legendary fog in glorious four-color gray. Visitors could take home a memory even if they had nothing to remember.

Summer had changed in other ways. July Fourth marked America’s two declarations of independence, also the start of California’s major fire season. Smoke turned the sky to the north Mars-orange. By early August, ashes crossed the Golden Gate and fell like snow. San Franciscans wore summer-white Memorial Day to Labor Day, filter masks from the Fourth through Thanksgiving.

The guy with whom I’d shared a personal moment muttered something about you people. Had our brief encounter familiarized him with my intimate parts?

When I was eight days old, I had a bris, though my parents were anything but religious Jews. Ditto my grandparents. But traditions like circumcision die hard. I don’t remember a thing. No Jewish guy does. Even so, as kids we exchanged jokes like, The mohel was a regular cut-up and Who wants to lug all that extra weight around?

After the Righteous Revolution, circumcision became politically risky. Would I have a bris for my son if I had one? That was one dilemma Indira and I wouldn’t be facing. Like everyone else in our shoes, we had a world of other problems to deal with.

Figuring a confrontation might bring consequences, I turned my back on the loudmouth. No mean feat. Grumbles met my repeated Sorry. To take my mind off the matter, I counted pothole strikes. When I hit twenty-three, the bus made it to Market Street. Eight more and I staggered off.

A BLOCK FROM THE BANK, two red-faced city cops approached me. The sway of their bodies suggested less swagger than the last hour of a long and boring shift. The shorter—taller than me—flicked his baton.

Being stopped downtown was routine, but sweat streamed from every pore in my forehead. My tongue stuck to my palate. I forced it free, licked my lips and smiled. I’d never known that little piece of business to soften a cop. Could have been a Pavlovian reaction. A fitting image. To them, I was little more than a dog.

ID, said the taller cop.

I pointed to my slacks’ right-front pocket.

He nodded.

Simulating slow motion, I took out my wallet.

The shorter cop’s eyes narrowed. He bared yellowed teeth.

I skipped pointing out that I hadn’t broken any law. Since when did that matter?

PASSING THROUGH THE BANK’S DOUBLE-DOOR ENTRY with built-in metal detector and by the poster-size photo of the President smiling down on the lobby floor, I found one reason to be cheerful. It hadn’t been my day to come in early and open up.

I raised my arms to let the air-conditioning work its magic—the bank had its standards—then slipped on my jacket and headed for assistant-manager row. A line of six narrow wood-and-glass-partitioned cubes—a place for everyone and everyone in his place—looked out onto the impressive lobby. Recent renovations hurled the company’s image back a century when the world revered the Yankee dollar and no one dreamed of the Chinese renminbi becoming the global reserve currency. The bank displayed institutional strength and prosperity with its marble floors, dark, wood-paneled walls and long line of teller cages with glittering brass grilles. ATMs—job killers—were history, sold as scrap to help Beijing expand the navy that ruled the South China Sea and western Pacific. Behind the cages stood a chorus line of female tellers and their assistants, each chosen for a trim figure and radiant smile. They represented less a nod to speeding transactions than compliance with the Omnibus Employment Act.

The OEA eventually sucked me into banking, about which I still knew little and cared less. After leaving San Francisco State with a B.A. in Early/Mid-Twentieth Century English Literature and Film, I stumbled into the real world without a clue. Grad school? Teaching? I couldn’t see myself returning to the classroom. Exiting academia proved one of the few smart decisions I ever made. Over the last decade, many humanities departments shut down following accusations of subverting traditional values.

What beckoned to me was a career in comedy. Timing always my perennial challenge, comedy clubs also were going under.

My father, something between a high-level bookkeeper and low-level accountant, insisted that comics were vulnerable to more than starvation. He quoted an old Japanese saying: The nail that stands up gets hammered down.

I returned Polonius’ advice to his son Laertes in Hamlet: To thine own self be true.

Easier said than done.

I loved entertaining friends but performing in public? Funny in the moment means nothing. Try getting up in front of people who paid a hard-earned cover or minimum and have a couple or more drinks under their belt. You come onstage and asses shift in seats to send a message: The fuck you’re funny. I didn’t work up the courage to do an open mic until my senior year at State.

A decade later, I still feel like a beginner.

I made a show of picking up a folder filled with loan applications. A quick glance across the lobby revealed a platoon of loan officers, assistant loan officers and customer-service reps, senior and junior, likewise pretending to be absorbed in their work. The Omnibus Employment Act gave everyone a job, although salaries and wages were calculated to barely cover essentials. Low pay encouraged men and women to marry and become a two-income family. Having children raised gross aggregate incomes since every kid meeting government qualifications provided a subsidy.

The folder gambit having accomplished its goal, I grabbed a pale green, bank-issue legal pad. The bank provided desktop computers, but their functionality—as with citizens’ laptops and tablets—was limited. For example, the bank restricted email to fellow employees. Taking the old-fashioned route, I hand-wrote bits and pieces of new jokes. At the moment, I couldn’t let go of So this cop runs into this hooker. Unsettled, though not by the joke’s prospects, I put the pen down. Something was off. Again, I looked around.

Larry, one of our co-managers, waved